Six years ago, during the pandemic, government officials rediscovered bicycles.
With public transportation collapsing and millions of Filipinos struggling to get to work, bicycles became survival vehicles. Roads once dominated by cars suddenly filled with delivery riders, health workers, office employees and commuters on two wheels. Government agencies hurriedly painted bicycle lanes across Metro Manila and spoke of a ‘new normal’ where cycling would finally become part of urban transport policy.
It was one of the few sensible lessons to emerge from the pandemic.
The problem is that many of our roads never truly adapted to cyclists at all.
The now-viral photograph from Tagaytay captures that reality with disturbing clarity. As reported in BusinessMirror’s news story on the incident, the injured cyclist was reportedly waiting near the roadside with fellow cyclists when a collision involving two vehicles sent a van toward her position.
She was not weaving recklessly through traffic. She was not counterflowing. According to the police report, she was waiting. Yet even waiting safely was apparently not enough.
That image of her lying on the pavement beside her damaged bicycle after the collision, partially trapped between vehicles near the roadside at the Tagaytay intersection, should force us to confront an uncomfortable truth: many Philippine roads remain fundamentally hostile to cyclists.
Government agencies like to celebrate the existence of bicycle lanes, but too many of these are little more than painted suggestions squeezed beside speeding traffic.
Bike lanes abruptly disappear beside parked vehicles, drainage covers, electric posts and blind intersections. Bollards meant to protect cyclists are damaged and left unreplaced. Motorcycles routinely occupy bicycle lanes with almost no consequence. Cyclists are pushed back into live traffic simply to continue moving forward.
Even years ago transport advocates already warned that many bike lanes being planned in Metro Manila and other Philippine cities were too narrow to be truly safe. Move As One argued as early as 2020 that narrow lanes were dangerous for cyclists and pointed to international standards requiring wider protected spaces. The coalition also noted that bicycles could move far more people efficiently within the same road space compared to private cars.
They were right then. They are right now.
A true bicycle network is not a strip of fading paint suddenly ending beside a parked SUV or an electric post. It is continuous, protected and interconnected. It allows cyclists to move through cities without constantly merging into fast-moving traffic or gambling their lives at intersections.
Safe bicycle infrastructure means physical barriers between cyclists and vehicles where possible. It means lanes wide enough for overtaking and real-world movement instead of symbolic compliance. It means intersections designed with cyclists in mind rather than treating them as afterthoughts squeezed into leftover road space. It means protected crossings, proper lighting, visible lane markings and strict enforcement against vehicles blocking cycling lanes.
Most of all, it means understanding that bicycles are transportation, not decoration.
Many of our road systems, however, remain designed almost entirely around automobiles.
Drivers often complain that bicycles slow traffic or ‘do not belong’ on major roads. But roads are public spaces, not private territory reserved for whoever owns the larger engine and heavier machine.
The imbalance is obvious. A mistake by a cyclist may injure himself. A mistake by a driver can kill another person. That is why civilized cities protect their most vulnerable road users first.
Yet in the Philippines, we continue widening roads for more vehicles, then act shocked when traffic becomes faster, angrier and deadlier. We praise cycling as healthy, environment-friendly and economical while forcing cyclists to negotiate daily with steel, smoke, heat and shrinking roadside space.
Then after every collision comes the familiar ritual.
Authorities remind everybody to ‘be careful.’ Investigations begin. Photos circulate online for several days before disappearing beneath the next traffic story.
But ‘be careful’ is not infrastructure.
The cyclist in Tagaytay reportedly did what responsible road users are supposed to do. She waited for the signal. She stayed near the roadside. And still she ended up trapped between steel and concrete.
The most frightening thing about the photograph is not simply the violence of the collision.